This is all so interesting to read. I have always been told I am "too sensitive" all my life (am 53 now). It's complicated though because I don't weep at weddings or really understand any sort of crying for joy? I have been fine so far with my 3 sons in terms of illness, as I can hold it together (not sure I would if it were serious illness though). What I really can't cope with is when they cry. They're 15, 17 and 18 now, so crying happens less, except for the 15 yr old who is ASD and cried quite a bit due to anxiety, etc. until quite recently, which was so painful to see. I do actually live in fear of all of their first relationship heartbreaks though. I remember being really upset when my older brother first had his heart broken, mainly because I think I was aware of how sad it was for our mum to see him so upset.
Won’t ever forget coming home from a funeral of a boy in the year above me at school (car crash, horrendous). I was telling my mum about it and she started to cry. I was FURIOUS with her because her feelings usurped mine and at 17 I needed guidance to deal with grief, not to comfort her. So maybe the ability to be the bin is what creates the connection? I hope my son will always seek to connect with me if he feels I can contain his distress. Whether I can, different story. When he sadly told me that Noah at nursery wouldn’t stop saying ‘bah bah bah’ at him my heart disintegrated.
This made me think of the poem ‘Atlas’ by U A Fanthorpe which begins ‘There is a kind of love called maintenance’. It’s about romantic rather than maternal love but the same principle applies, that this type of love is just as (possibly more?) important as all the fluffy stuff.
I feel quite similar about the lack of emotions! My sister calls me The Ice Princess and when my friends ask for advice I have to ask them if they want advice or empathy as I find often they really want the latter and don’t appreciate when I try to help a container for their feelings as I do with my children too. Oddly there is one major exception to my otherwise rock-solid ability to be a container for my kids feelings and that is when they are emoting to another adult. I took my 7 year old son to a psychiatrist for an ADHD assessment recently and my son became tearful describing his “big feelings” (aka rages) to the doctor and I sat there getting tearful myself and was then totally mortified to find this explicitly called out in the assessment! I have absolutely never done this when dealing directly with his feelings so still trying to work this one out! Also I feel like the shower is a parallel universe where I regularly sob out all the stress that I otherwise never reveal. Probably need some more time with my own therapist on these ones 🤣🤣🤣
My sons are all in their 20s now but your piece brought back visceral memories of the physicality of caring for them when they were small.
Like you, I remember being obsessed with cleaning them, not in a germ phobic way but to keep them tidy as we’d say in Wales. My husband caught me approaching a sleeping child with tweezers to clean their grotty nose and thought I was quite mad.
Rerunning an experience at the doctors was definitely a thing for me too.
Years later, with them all flown, they tease me for my eagle eye at spotting the slightest mark on their clothing and accosting them with a damp cloth. The nearest I can get these days!
My 39 year old is off to Glastonbury tomorrow, he’s lived in a different city since he was 21 and has been to Glastonbury almost every time since he was about 18 and I’ve just texted to remind him to pack spf.
It’s funny because I have two daughters but only feel a strong physical connection with one of them. I swear I love them both dearly and we have great relationships, but it’s like the umbilical was never properly severed with the older one, yet the younger one is an entirely separate physical entity to me.
It’s hard to describe but with my oldest I lose track of whose body stuff is happening to. Like if she has a headache I’ll find myself absently thinking, oh I should take some paracetamol for my headache. She is allergic to some sun creams and I am not, but I find myself avoiding them because some part of my brain thinks we’re the same body with the same allergies. It’s is properly mad, especially since I don’t have this with my other daughter at all.
Yes! My friend called this the ‘invisible umbilical’ when, in the early newborn days, I tried to describe the MADDEST sensation of gazing at my daughter next to me in bed and being totally disorientated as to where I ended and she began - I can articulate it no better writing it down 7 years later, but that’s the nub of it, it’s like she was an extension of me and I still get the sort of abstract moments of connection (headache etc) you describe. With my son, I feel like from day dot he came into the world as his own person, I often feel more like his custodian than his mother…it’s still a beautiful, close, loving relationship, but much more defined, somehow. Watch him grow up far less neurotic than her 😆.
Me too, wish I could find better words for it. I’ll be glad for it to stay, l suspect at a certain point my daughter will have other ideas though! Have you talked to your daughter about it? Bit awks if you don’t get it with the other one I s’pose…!
Friendship problems, all the friendship problems. And you're helpless to do anything about it except offer good advice (should you actually be able to think of any that would make a difference under tricky circumstances), which much of the time they won't take on board.
When the kids were small and unwell or upset, I used to think I should be able to photograph my distress and fretfulness, it was that real and all consuming and SOLID. Now they’re bigger it’s somewhat, only somewhat less painful, or maybe I’ve learned to cope better. Death by a thousand cuts, eh?
This past week my son turned 18 and then last night went to prom in a spanking new tux he bought with his own money. I’ve been a bit of an emotional wreck - how can he be 18 when I was only 18 (it feels) like yesterday?? I have wanted to endlessly hug him. Poured over baby photos. It feels like a physical shift. I’m a very tactile mother but only because mine wasn’t. Also my favourite thing is cleaning out ears (daughter got one of those in ear cameras for Xmas) and blackheads. A blackhead in the groove of an ear is just screaming at me to remove it and I have utensils to do so. Give me the blackheads. All of them.
My 10yo went on his first school residential last week - just for one night. He's autistic and very anxious, but handled it beautifully. I (unbeknown to him) was in a Premier Inn about 3 miles away in case of difficulty. I fell asleep at about 11 and woke at 1.15am with the most horrendous doom-y feeling. It passed quickly, but I was quite rattled and lay awake reading until almost 5am.
The next day, his teacher told me he'd woken crying overnight, and she'd sat on his bed and held his hand until he went back to sleep. I didn't ask her what time he woke, but despite generally being a pretty logical/rational/scientific sort of person, I am absolutely convinced that it was 1.15am.
I'm not a playing parent. I love taking them to theatre or museums or even just to the supermarket but more than 10 mins of My Little Pony or Thomas the Tank Engine makes me want to run away to sea. I work full-time, my husband part-time around our kids and I am the family administrator, the person who gets shit done and for my son, the person who anticipates his next challenge and either gets rid of it or scaffolds it so that he can manage it.
That is such a useful concept. To make sure things are in place so they can do the thing - eg no screen time until bag is packed & shoes are put in the shoe drawer in the hall so tomorrow morning the teen can get themselves out the door with minimum chaos.
I struggle to articulate to my husband what I’m doing for our kids (one in particular ) and why I get ragey when i work late and he doesn’t do this kind of prep/ scaffolding. He’s great, a lovely dad but he just doesn’t see how he needs to set the structure and actively monitor/ enforce it
This feels like me too. It's not that I don't feel but maybe years of being alone at home with babies has me emotionally self reliant and practical. Though I am also a bit of weirdo with spots and earwax so I can imagine I'd be reliving that moment if I'd witnessed it. My daughter had a huge ear spot she let me squeeze for her and this was about two years ago and I still think of it fondly. Especially now as a mid teen she thinks I'm an annoying loser - probably one of the most bonding experiences we've had. I really want to de-wax now.
Me and my sons are all autistic, and we are not generally very touchy-feely. They all slept in my bed until they were between 4 and 6, so it's not like I'm averse to cuddling them or being close to them, but I am quite hands-off otherwise. I am a MANAGING mother, I run this house and all its (endless) paperwork and do my best to teach the boys How To Do Things. I've mentioned before how much of autism-parenting is showing, literally DEMONSTRATING how to do things because following instructions is not very easy for them. I consider my main parenting job to be to teach competence alongside care.
But if my kids are ever ill, or worse, injured, I go into boggle-eyed-loon mother mode, absolutely melting down inside, catastrophising and weeping. I can usually hold it together externally and be supportive, useful parent but inside, I am flayed.
in my writing travels I have ended up writing about neurodivergence quite a lot and a thing that most psychiatrists talk about is the importance of Executive Function - i.e. just that: planning ahead, doing things in the right order, this is how you wash your hair, this is how you make packet noodles, this is how you put something in the dishwasher.
Exactly that. A lot of autistic (and I think almost all ADHD) people have executive dysfunction in various different ways: task perseverence, finishing something once you've started, is the biggest issue in our house.
But autism has the other element of difficulty in passive learning. I remember being explicitly taught to use a knife and fork properly when I was about 14 because everyone simply assumed you 'picked it up as you go along'. Not with autism you don't!
I had to LEARN ways around my own executive dysfunction as an undiagnosed kid who was also the eldest girl in a family of seven (a whole other thing), and now have overcompensated so my EF is always ON POINT but the slightest shift to schedule has me in a panic spiral of chaos. It feels like a house of cards.
Parents do seem to be so much more full on these days... my kids have flown the nest apart from the 23 year old ‘baby’. But I seem to be still administering doctors advice, hairdresser’s details, dentists ...lending my posh wellies to my 29 year old to take to glasto ..and yet I remember well the day I had my English A level and my mother had absolutely no idea I was even taking exams.
I think I am you. My children always have the forms, the right kit, the donation for the fete, the correctly themed costume. All the 'what time is x? do they need y today?' messages in the WhatsApp make me recoil - you should KNOW, I KNOW so clearly all the information was available. I think my 8 year old thinks I am strict but he will never ever know the pain of not having the right stuff/being late/not being able to join in because I haven't paid.
This is all so interesting to read. I have always been told I am "too sensitive" all my life (am 53 now). It's complicated though because I don't weep at weddings or really understand any sort of crying for joy? I have been fine so far with my 3 sons in terms of illness, as I can hold it together (not sure I would if it were serious illness though). What I really can't cope with is when they cry. They're 15, 17 and 18 now, so crying happens less, except for the 15 yr old who is ASD and cried quite a bit due to anxiety, etc. until quite recently, which was so painful to see. I do actually live in fear of all of their first relationship heartbreaks though. I remember being really upset when my older brother first had his heart broken, mainly because I think I was aware of how sad it was for our mum to see him so upset.
Won’t ever forget coming home from a funeral of a boy in the year above me at school (car crash, horrendous). I was telling my mum about it and she started to cry. I was FURIOUS with her because her feelings usurped mine and at 17 I needed guidance to deal with grief, not to comfort her. So maybe the ability to be the bin is what creates the connection? I hope my son will always seek to connect with me if he feels I can contain his distress. Whether I can, different story. When he sadly told me that Noah at nursery wouldn’t stop saying ‘bah bah bah’ at him my heart disintegrated.
Interesting to hear the perspective from when you were 17! That makes sense.
This made me think of the poem ‘Atlas’ by U A Fanthorpe which begins ‘There is a kind of love called maintenance’. It’s about romantic rather than maternal love but the same principle applies, that this type of love is just as (possibly more?) important as all the fluffy stuff.
Love that poem! It was one of the readings at our wedding. A good reality check!
I feel quite similar about the lack of emotions! My sister calls me The Ice Princess and when my friends ask for advice I have to ask them if they want advice or empathy as I find often they really want the latter and don’t appreciate when I try to help a container for their feelings as I do with my children too. Oddly there is one major exception to my otherwise rock-solid ability to be a container for my kids feelings and that is when they are emoting to another adult. I took my 7 year old son to a psychiatrist for an ADHD assessment recently and my son became tearful describing his “big feelings” (aka rages) to the doctor and I sat there getting tearful myself and was then totally mortified to find this explicitly called out in the assessment! I have absolutely never done this when dealing directly with his feelings so still trying to work this one out! Also I feel like the shower is a parallel universe where I regularly sob out all the stress that I otherwise never reveal. Probably need some more time with my own therapist on these ones 🤣🤣🤣
My sons are all in their 20s now but your piece brought back visceral memories of the physicality of caring for them when they were small.
Like you, I remember being obsessed with cleaning them, not in a germ phobic way but to keep them tidy as we’d say in Wales. My husband caught me approaching a sleeping child with tweezers to clean their grotty nose and thought I was quite mad.
Rerunning an experience at the doctors was definitely a thing for me too.
Years later, with them all flown, they tease me for my eagle eye at spotting the slightest mark on their clothing and accosting them with a damp cloth. The nearest I can get these days!
My 39 year old is off to Glastonbury tomorrow, he’s lived in a different city since he was 21 and has been to Glastonbury almost every time since he was about 18 and I’ve just texted to remind him to pack spf.
It’s funny because I have two daughters but only feel a strong physical connection with one of them. I swear I love them both dearly and we have great relationships, but it’s like the umbilical was never properly severed with the older one, yet the younger one is an entirely separate physical entity to me.
It’s hard to describe but with my oldest I lose track of whose body stuff is happening to. Like if she has a headache I’ll find myself absently thinking, oh I should take some paracetamol for my headache. She is allergic to some sun creams and I am not, but I find myself avoiding them because some part of my brain thinks we’re the same body with the same allergies. It’s is properly mad, especially since I don’t have this with my other daughter at all.
Yes! My friend called this the ‘invisible umbilical’ when, in the early newborn days, I tried to describe the MADDEST sensation of gazing at my daughter next to me in bed and being totally disorientated as to where I ended and she began - I can articulate it no better writing it down 7 years later, but that’s the nub of it, it’s like she was an extension of me and I still get the sort of abstract moments of connection (headache etc) you describe. With my son, I feel like from day dot he came into the world as his own person, I often feel more like his custodian than his mother…it’s still a beautiful, close, loving relationship, but much more defined, somehow. Watch him grow up far less neurotic than her 😆.
I’m so glad someone else has experienced this! It’s so strange. And my oldest is now 14 so I’m not sure it ever goes away.
Haha yep I think you’re right on both fronts!
Me too, wish I could find better words for it. I’ll be glad for it to stay, l suspect at a certain point my daughter will have other ideas though! Have you talked to your daughter about it? Bit awks if you don’t get it with the other one I s’pose…!
No I’ve never told her! Or the other one! I think she’d just think I was insane. And probably the last thing you’d want to hear as a 14 year old
Friendship problems, all the friendship problems. And you're helpless to do anything about it except offer good advice (should you actually be able to think of any that would make a difference under tricky circumstances), which much of the time they won't take on board.
I feel seen.
When the kids were small and unwell or upset, I used to think I should be able to photograph my distress and fretfulness, it was that real and all consuming and SOLID. Now they’re bigger it’s somewhat, only somewhat less painful, or maybe I’ve learned to cope better. Death by a thousand cuts, eh?
This past week my son turned 18 and then last night went to prom in a spanking new tux he bought with his own money. I’ve been a bit of an emotional wreck - how can he be 18 when I was only 18 (it feels) like yesterday?? I have wanted to endlessly hug him. Poured over baby photos. It feels like a physical shift. I’m a very tactile mother but only because mine wasn’t. Also my favourite thing is cleaning out ears (daughter got one of those in ear cameras for Xmas) and blackheads. A blackhead in the groove of an ear is just screaming at me to remove it and I have utensils to do so. Give me the blackheads. All of them.
My 10yo went on his first school residential last week - just for one night. He's autistic and very anxious, but handled it beautifully. I (unbeknown to him) was in a Premier Inn about 3 miles away in case of difficulty. I fell asleep at about 11 and woke at 1.15am with the most horrendous doom-y feeling. It passed quickly, but I was quite rattled and lay awake reading until almost 5am.
The next day, his teacher told me he'd woken crying overnight, and she'd sat on his bed and held his hand until he went back to sleep. I didn't ask her what time he woke, but despite generally being a pretty logical/rational/scientific sort of person, I am absolutely convinced that it was 1.15am.
I'm not a playing parent. I love taking them to theatre or museums or even just to the supermarket but more than 10 mins of My Little Pony or Thomas the Tank Engine makes me want to run away to sea. I work full-time, my husband part-time around our kids and I am the family administrator, the person who gets shit done and for my son, the person who anticipates his next challenge and either gets rid of it or scaffolds it so that he can manage it.
Scaffolding it!
That is such a useful concept. To make sure things are in place so they can do the thing - eg no screen time until bag is packed & shoes are put in the shoe drawer in the hall so tomorrow morning the teen can get themselves out the door with minimum chaos.
I struggle to articulate to my husband what I’m doing for our kids (one in particular ) and why I get ragey when i work late and he doesn’t do this kind of prep/ scaffolding. He’s great, a lovely dad but he just doesn’t see how he needs to set the structure and actively monitor/ enforce it
Sigh so mentally draining
This feels like me too. It's not that I don't feel but maybe years of being alone at home with babies has me emotionally self reliant and practical. Though I am also a bit of weirdo with spots and earwax so I can imagine I'd be reliving that moment if I'd witnessed it. My daughter had a huge ear spot she let me squeeze for her and this was about two years ago and I still think of it fondly. Especially now as a mid teen she thinks I'm an annoying loser - probably one of the most bonding experiences we've had. I really want to de-wax now.
Me and my sons are all autistic, and we are not generally very touchy-feely. They all slept in my bed until they were between 4 and 6, so it's not like I'm averse to cuddling them or being close to them, but I am quite hands-off otherwise. I am a MANAGING mother, I run this house and all its (endless) paperwork and do my best to teach the boys How To Do Things. I've mentioned before how much of autism-parenting is showing, literally DEMONSTRATING how to do things because following instructions is not very easy for them. I consider my main parenting job to be to teach competence alongside care.
But if my kids are ever ill, or worse, injured, I go into boggle-eyed-loon mother mode, absolutely melting down inside, catastrophising and weeping. I can usually hold it together externally and be supportive, useful parent but inside, I am flayed.
in my writing travels I have ended up writing about neurodivergence quite a lot and a thing that most psychiatrists talk about is the importance of Executive Function - i.e. just that: planning ahead, doing things in the right order, this is how you wash your hair, this is how you make packet noodles, this is how you put something in the dishwasher.
Exactly that. A lot of autistic (and I think almost all ADHD) people have executive dysfunction in various different ways: task perseverence, finishing something once you've started, is the biggest issue in our house.
But autism has the other element of difficulty in passive learning. I remember being explicitly taught to use a knife and fork properly when I was about 14 because everyone simply assumed you 'picked it up as you go along'. Not with autism you don't!
I had to LEARN ways around my own executive dysfunction as an undiagnosed kid who was also the eldest girl in a family of seven (a whole other thing), and now have overcompensated so my EF is always ON POINT but the slightest shift to schedule has me in a panic spiral of chaos. It feels like a house of cards.
Parents do seem to be so much more full on these days... my kids have flown the nest apart from the 23 year old ‘baby’. But I seem to be still administering doctors advice, hairdresser’s details, dentists ...lending my posh wellies to my 29 year old to take to glasto ..and yet I remember well the day I had my English A level and my mother had absolutely no idea I was even taking exams.
Hope you took a souvenir photo of the ear wax!!
I think I am you. My children always have the forms, the right kit, the donation for the fete, the correctly themed costume. All the 'what time is x? do they need y today?' messages in the WhatsApp make me recoil - you should KNOW, I KNOW so clearly all the information was available. I think my 8 year old thinks I am strict but he will never ever know the pain of not having the right stuff/being late/not being able to join in because I haven't paid.
We parent in all the we haven’t been parented….
Oh my, how this resonates with me!